Roger Hedgecock: South Carolina proud

The heart of the Confederacy, the state where secession began and the first shots of the Civil War were fired has this year sent a black man to the United States Senate.

Tim Scott is the first African-American U.S. senator from any southern state since Reconstruction and the only black in the U.S. Senate today.

Sen. Scott is a Republican, a conservative, was an elected member of the House of Representatives, and a small-business owner (independent insurance agency). Which is why you may never have heard of him in most of the media.

As remarkably, Congressman Scott was appointed by the female daughter of immigrants from India, South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, to fill out the term of Sen. Jim DeMint, who resigned to head the Heritage Foundation.

South Carolina has come a long way from its slaveholding past and its Democratic Party heritage.

To give you some idea of how far South Carolina has come, consider that Sen. Scott will sit in the seat occupied in the 1850s by Democrat James Henry Hammond, the lesser known seatmate to South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun.

Hammond led the South Carolina congressional delegation out of Congress in protest against the election of Abraham Lincoln and led the fight to have South Carolina secede from the Union even before Lincoln was inaugurated.

Hammond was famous in his day for coining the phrase “Cotton is King”. He owned Redcliffe, a plantation on Beech Island, S.C., which was worked by slaves.

While serving as South Carolina’s governor, Hammond wrote, “I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles.”

In 1836, as a one-term member of the House, Hammond spoke from the floor ridiculing the idea that freed slaves could become members of the legislature.

“Are we prepared to see them mingling in our Legislature?” he said. “Is any portion of this country prepared to see them enter these halls and take their seats by our sides, in perfect equality with the white representatives ... from such a picture I turn with irrepressible disgust.”

Now Tim Scott, descended from slaves, sits in the Senate seat Hammond occupied; justice and progress at long last.

South Carolina’s present-day Democrat Congressman James E. Clyburn, also an African-American, who noted that he rarely agreed politically with Tim Scott, responded to the Scott appointment by saying, “The historic nature of this appointment is not lost on me and I am confident Tim Scott will represent South Carolina and the country honorably.”

But Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, was not so laudatory. “We have Republicans who believe in civil rights – unfortunately he is not one of them,” he said in a recent interview.

My view? A descendant of slaves being appointed to the U.S. Senate from South Carolina by a governor who is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, is a milestone of civil rights unmatched by any achievement of Mr. Jealous. Scott’s appointment is civil rights in action, not words.